The Midnight Club: What The Netflix Series Gets Right About Jump Scares

gamerant.com:

Mike Flanagan recently hit the Guinness Book of World Records for the most jump scares in a single TV episode. He included 21 jump scares in the first episode of his new Netflix horror series The Midnight Club called «The Final Chapter.» While the show would be impressive on its own, with the smart characters and dialogue present in Flanagan's other projects, the way that The Midnight Club uses jump scares makes horror fans think about the place that this trope has in the genre.

While episode one has several jump scares in a row, there are a few placed throughout season 1, and they are always used well. There are a few reasons why The Midnight Club has nailed the reason to use jump scares in a scary story.

New Midnight Club Images Reveal Roles For Mike Flanagan Regulars

There's an art to a good jump scare and horror fans love debating this topic. When discussing his Guinness Book of World Records inclusion, Flanagan told NPR that he thinks that too many movies employ this element. Flanagan said, «I think they're overused is really my point. It's not that I dislike them. I react very much to not the jump scare itself, but to the insistence that I get usually from executives that say, 'you need to have a prescribed number of [jump scares] in the show, and you need to have five jump scares in the first 15 minutes or else it's not scary.'»

Flanagan wanted to put a ton of jump scares into one episode, and it's definitely a fun, wild and funny ride. Natsuki (Aya Furukawa) tells the first scary story of the show about a boy walking home alone one night and continually being followed by a mysterious, terrifying figure. The figure keeps popping up and is always behind him or over one shoulder. While the character in the tale is